He used to think about things while he waited. What he needed to do at the office. What he needed to do when he got home. What he’d have for supper. What he’d seen on television. What he’d do if he won the Lotto. What his girlfriend said. What she really meant when she said it. What he needed to buy at the market. Where he’d like to go on holiday. Where he could afford to go on holiday. What sort of novel he’d write if he had any talent. What he’d get his mum for her birthday.

He used to think about things, but over the course a couple years of commuting the fluorescent lights overhead had sucked the capacity for thought right out of his brain.

He used to hear things while he waited. Whispers. The crisp whisper of a turning page. The sad desperate whispered cell phone conversation of somebody too weary to fight anymore. The seductive whisper of nylons as a woman walked by. The liquid whisper of lips against a coffee container.

Even over the all the noise of trains and bustling commuters, he used to hear whispers. But they’d all grown dim and distant, replaced by a sort of white noise–a non-noise that wasn’t quite sound and wasn’t quite silence. A semi-auditory hiss that, if it existed at all, must originate from somewhere deep in the earth’s core or perhaps off in distant space, the sizzling of a dying star.

A couple years of commuting and now he thinks nothing, hears nothing, feels nothing but an occasional spasm of near-anxiety that his train might have already come and gone.